Winter Conservatory

As Evelyn Huffman has the botanist aspiration like her grandmother, I knew pretty early on that she was going to be working at a conservatory. I was inspired by the conservatory at Como Park, here in Minneapolis. It is a wonderful place to go in January and February when the cold is too much to bear. Since the main room there is tropical, it is kept warm and humid and it perhaps the best place for your mind, soul, and skin during January’s bitter winds.

I also visited the conservatory in Copenhagen in January. Really, visit green things when it’s snowing and cold, it’s so refreshing. Which was very similar in style to Como Park but had a small second story above the main room. In my mind the outdoors should be a snowy field so half my pictures were taken with the snow mod enabled. Sadly though the outdoor plants I used indoors meant that I had to remove it for the indoor shots. Oh well.

My Winter Conservatory is much smaller than either actual conservatory, but I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. The entryway has a small sign for donations as, like my conservatory, it is run by donation only. The double doors keep the warmth in and the cold out. (Luckily Windenburg rarely gets below zero Fahrenheit because no fantasy land of mine is ever going to do that if I can help it).

Inside the main room is three stories tall with several large trees reaching up past the overlook. There are three main areas. A fern focused garden, The llama garden near a small desert patch, and the ‘forest’ area with all the tall trees. Take a seat on a bench and stay a while. Outside the snow is blowing and cold, but here you’ll want to leave your coat behind.

Head upstairs when you’re ready to get a different view of the tropical area.

There are two wings (rather than the three I’m pretty sure all conservatives come standard with based on my limited two-conservatory experience). The water garden is based off the sunken garden at Como. It’s probably one of the more popular gardens there and my friends held their wedding there several years ago. That was the first time I wore heels. Sadly it was a standing room only wedding and my dalliance with heeled footwear was very short lived.

I had a lot of fun making the fountain in here. Did you know that Sims doesn’t let you build a fountain indoors? Yeah. That’s a swimming pool. If you let your sims visit, they may try to jump in. In the far back is a wall of roses, had I room, I would have added a wedding arch in case others wanted to follow in my friends’ footsteps.

The second wing is the working wing. The conservatory in Copenhagen is a “working” conservatory attached to the university there and so many of the plants are used by biologists. This room was kind of inspired by that idea. A place to work and grow plants. It’s quite crowded and shooting in here was a pain with the pathing. You will probably want to remove a few items if you place this so the sims can move around.

Evelyn works in this room and new seedlings are started here before they’re moved out into the public gardens. It’s off limits to the public.

The exterior doesn’t have much landscaping as the scene I needed was set in the winter when there wouldn’t be a lot of gardens visible through the glass. But you can imagine that in the summer there are many more flower beds as the conservatory leaks beyond the glass. I love when exterior and interior spaces bleed into one another, one extending the other.

The conservatory is set to “general” as it has no amenities. I would recommend making it a park and adding that to the backyard if you want to have a proper public location. The lot I picked was too small to add bathrooms without ruining the exterior shape, or making the wings too narrow. If I get around to making a summer version of this lot, I’ll make it a proper park.